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Every time a With new console releases, PC gamers like me are quick to remind the gaming community that our platform of choice offers more power and versatility than even the newest and brightest console. That’s still true this time, but things feel a little … different.
In fact, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are more powerful than the two mid-range gaming PCs in my office, which would not have been seen in the days of the PS4 and Xbox One. While the PC still has great advantage in terms of performance rank“I mean, you can spend more to get more – the latest consoles are more PC-like than ever and are closing the performance gap more than their predecessors.”
When Sony announced the PlayStation 4, hardware experts knew it was going to be underpowered. AnandTech noted that console makers weren’t taking CPU performance seriously enough and that the GPU was equivalent to a Radeon HD 7850 or 7870, then $ 140 and $ 170 graphics cards. That’s lower than a mid-range price, meaning you could build a PC that tops the pants of the PS4 and Xbox One quite affordably; in fact, many games had lower frame rates, degraded graphics, or both compared to half-decent PCs at the time. (This wasn’t true across the board, some notorious PC ports had their own issues, but it’s clear that even a mid-range PC would provide you with more raw gaming power.)
Part of this was due to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the semiconductor company that has designed the processors and graphics chips inside Sony and Microsoft consoles for the past two generations. “When the next-gen consoles were released, AMD was in bad shape,” explains Brad Chacos, senior graphics and games editor at PC World. “They were still running their old Bulldozer architecture, which was a big gamble that didn’t pay off.”
That flaw made them play a secondary role with Intel for years in the PC space, and the Jaguar processors inside the PS4 and Xbox One were dimmed, low-power versions of that already weak product. So even though the developers were able to optimize the games for that hardware, it still couldn’t compare to a well-built PC.
This year, as Chacos puts it, AMD is “going full blast,” with its latest Ryzen 5000 processors outperforming Intel across the board for the first time in a decade and a half. And since those chips are also found in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, unlike the old Jaguar processors, almost tablet-like on the next-gen consoles, they can come much closer to the performance you’d find in a good gaming PC.
However, it’s not just about processors and graphics chips. Solid-state drives, or SSDs, have finally made their way to consoles as well, providing the fast load times we’ve enjoyed on PCs for years. SSDs also allow for faster patch downloads and faster travel, which are real quality-of-life improvements that made previous consoles feel old and slow from the start. Put all of that together, and the latest consoles look a lot like gaming PCs in terms of graphical prowess.
To be fair, this year’s consoles are also a bit more expensive than their predecessors: $ 500 for the top-tier PS5 and Xbox Series X compared to the $ 400 PS4 and Xbox One (after the Kinect removal). . That higher price tag gives manufacturers some leeway to include more powerful hardware, but Chacos notes that these consoles are still “exceptional values,” particularly given the fact that PC hardware has been outrageously marked in 2020 (thanks , Covid-19). $ 500 may be more expensive than the last generation, but it’s an attractive price for the graphics fidelity you get, and the digital PS4 hits that old $ 400 price point with the same performance as the $ 500 version. (Although I’d say Sony offers that lower price in the hope that you’ll pay more for digital games in the long run.)
